Sour Grapes

Today I spent some time re-reading Aesop. Every time I pick him back up, I am reminded of how well the stories he recorded so completed defined humanity, and how quick we are to forget his wisdom. They’re the sorts of tales that just don’t stay with us too long because his insights are too penetratingly simple.

Today’s reading was old favorite I had forgotten, entitled The Fox and the Grapes:

One hot summer day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been hung over a lofty branch. “Just the things to quench my thirst,” he said. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed taking hold of the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: “I am sure they are sour.”

This is one of many stories attributed to Aesop – a collection of old sayings and proverbs from a time that has long since passed us by. The proverb from which this story was driven (or perhaps the proverb that arose after) went something like this: “When the fox cannot reach the grapes, he insists they were not ripe.”

I can’t even begin to explain how often, as a pastor, I have witnessed this phenomenon. It plays out in our day to day lives in so many ways – from relationships, to employment, to politics, to the creative arts, and perhaps most interesting to me: in our spirituality.

I see two extremes of this phenomenon (modern psychology calls it “cognitive dissonance,” but I see no good reason to muddy up such a simple truth). The first extreme that I notice belongs to that of the true believer. Men and women so convinced that their destiny is set that they stop trying to accomplish anything.

These dear souls are the “God willed it” crew and for whatever reason have surrendered the best parts of themselves over to fate without putting up much of a fight. Worse, they not only stop trying, they conclude that what they were striving for was a “bad” thing.

• “My daughter is always in a hurry to get off the phone with me. I just shrug it off. Until God changes her heart, I believe a conversation with her is pointless.”
  
• “That job I lost last month sucked anyway. Until God gives me another one, I will stay home and wait on the right one.”
  
• “It just wasn’t God’s will for us to fall in love. Dating sucks anyway. Why would anyone bother?”
  

Now I’m not one to say exactly what God wants or doesn’t want for people in their employment or relationships with others. I think there are some basic principles to go by for sure, but no real specifics. Even so, I feel pretty confident that giving up on anything and using God as a personal scapegoat is probably, according to Aesop anyway, “sour grapes.”

There are exceptions of course. Some people work so hard to attain something they get psychotic. In relationships, we sometimes call them “stalkers.” In the work force, we call them over-compensators. People do get out of balance in the other direction, but I’ve found them to be far less frequent than those who just throw in the towel and say, “No big deal, the match was rigged anyway.”

It’s one thing to not be able to reach your goal. Heck, I’ve got a dozen that I likely won’t reach without miraculous intervention. The story of the Fox and the Grapes isn’t about things that are just simply out of our reach. It’s about drawing the wrong conclusions about the thing we were reaching for to begin with.

You see the Fox would rather draw conclusions about the grapes, than to seriously consider his own stature or limitations.

That brings me to the second extreme I encounter pretty regularly in my line of work. This type is the opposite of the true believer – it’s the perpetual skeptic.

The perpetual skeptic believes that just because he’s been unable to reach any spiritual fruits, they must not be real. It doesn’t matter that other people around him might be enjoying them. Actually the only time the beliefs of other people matter to him at all is when he sees an opportunity to point out how sour he believes the fruit to be.

He’s the embittered atheist who not only refuses to jump up for the fruit, but draws the wrong conclusions about a fruit he cannot reach. Unable to evaluate his own stature and limitations, he determines that the fitness of the fruit is solely dependent on where he’s standing. Concluding that the fruit is bad, he then makes an attempt to ruin the meal for everyone else.

Certainly there are exceptions here as well, just as above. Some unbeliever’s spend their entire lives without a shred of concern for what other’s might be believing or doing. They live a “no harm, no foul” life and leave the true believers to enjoy whatever it is they seem to be enjoying. There’s also the unbeliever who quite rightly challenges the believer in issues of injustice, prejudice, or hatred. For these, I doubt the parable applies at all.

But there are many, I meet them constantly, who are motivated in a much different manner. They’re not simply non-religious, they are spiritual antagonizers. One gets the feeling when conversing with them that they aren’t so much out to convince you that your grapes are sour; they’re embittered that you’re eating at all.

Aesop’s conclusion to his parable is very simple: “It is easy to despise what you cannot attain.”

I don’t think it even has to be that harshly worded. The Fox doesn’t despise the grapes. Instead, he has convinced himself that he never wanted them in the first place. It reminds me of the saying:

“The danger of starvation is not just trying to live without food. The real danger when you are starving comes after you have convinced yourself that you are no longer hungry.”

I think, spiritually speaking, that defines much of my generation.

Censoring America's Best Jokes

The Obama administration has made it painstakingly obvious that they're content to embattle Fox News with little regard for any outcomes that might arise from it. Certainly this activity is backfiring and will continue to backfire as the administration generates a martyr syndrome among American conservatives, who quite frankly need be given no more opportunities to point at their wounds.

Reasonable people see through Fox News. Extremely reasonable people see through all news, regardless of the network. Reasonable people with a lick of talent and motivation read source documents on all their news. Make no mistake, Fox is anything but "Fair and Balanced."

But then again, there's not much out there that is when it comes to politics, religion, and social issues. America is shrouded in idiocy, a long and lingering hangover from the 60's and 70's when we emphatically decided we'd toss balance out the window and polarize ourselves as a nation.

We're now a nation with a crazy bunch of microphone hogs on both the Left and the Right. Politics have never been more of a joke than they've been these last ten years. From "dangling chads" to disguised pimps with hidden video cams in ACORN offices, one gets the feeling that our so called "news" exists more for entertainment than anything else these days.

The real problem comes when you have one group of people (namely the free speechers on the Left) who've decided one set of jokes just isn't funny anymore. From the Fairness Doctrine to this week's FCC ruling on Internet blogs to the recent snafu on excluding Fox News from an interview they had arranged, these Free-Speechers are hell bent on telling us when, where, and how we ought to laugh.

These self-proclaimed champions of liberty are all about any speech that agrees with them and their warm-fuzzy picture of the future (which ironically can be obtained as young people were advised last week, with a unique blending of Mao and Mother Teresea's tenacity). And speaking of "Fair and Balanced," were it not for Fox News then Anita Dunn's ill-placed comments would have fallen away largely unrecognized by the public. Even Dunn admits it was an ill-conceived attempt at breaking the ice as she spent nearly three minutes of a speech to high school students heaping praise on perhaps the most notorious mass murderer in human history.

If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny. But Dunn didn't admit she'd made a mistake until after Fox News brought it up, and more importantly, until after she'd fully bashed them for doing it. So yeah, Fox caught the joke. Spreading the joke and contextualizing it wasn't funny though.

Leave it to government to tell us when to laugh. The Obama adminstration's assualt on Fox News is only an attempt to make the mockery that is American politics appear less funny. And that 60% of us in the middle really do enjoy laughing at the 20% of you on either extreme, so please let us have our fun. Stop censoring America's best jokes.

Like did you hear the one about the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee who steers discourse on tax laws -- and how he hasn't been paying his own taxes?

Or how about the one where the President of the National Association of Evangelicals got caught paying for man to man sexual acts after building his career preaching against homosexuality?

Of course I just shared the one about the White House Communication Director who communicated rather eloquently (to a group of American teenagers no less) the upside of a dictatorship which forced starving families to trade their children with each other because they couldn't bear to cannibalize their own offspring.

Please, I'll be here all week.

That is of course unless our President decides to wage a war of censorship on me too.

Kitten Claws & the Kowtow Christ

I am fully aware of the hubris of the Christian Right. I experience constantly in my line of work and truth be known, probably spent a good portion of my journey guilty of it. It’s a hubris that assumes everyone is in the same place, that one can speak in absolutes, and that one has full permission to act upon these absolutes with little regard for others around. It’s what I call, “In Your Face” Christianity.

I’m not a fan. At this stage of my life, I’ve had to mop up enough messes left behind from this kind of hubris. It damages free-thinking people. It closes doors to people who would be otherwise open and receptive to the gospel. When binding up the wounds inflicted on a person from a presumptive, and ideologically violent Christian, then it can take years to repair the burned bridge. These sorts of people don’t do the gospel any favors and they make my job infinitely more difficult.

At the same time this problem is happening on the Right, we have a much different issue on the left. I’m going to call it, “The Kowtow Christ” for lack of a better term. The Kowtow Christ assumes a subservient role, not just where one is needed as in the example of Jesus washing feet, but also in places where lying prostrate before inferior and even harmful ideologies can do an equal amount of damage.

To get to where I’m coming from (and I recognize you may very well not want to), we have to move beyond the hot-button topics of today. For many, acknowledgement of a KowTow Christ only comes when certain religious taboos appear in culture – such as homosexuality or abortion. It doesn’t take long for the hubris to kick in on these topics and sensitive clergy find themselves once again attempting to mop up the blood from hacking and slashing of a fully armed Christian assault on yet another human life.

It’s a bit broader and more ideological than that. It’s liberalism of a much higher order. The kind of intellectual kowtowing that seeks to place the most delicate human ideas in the lap of naturalism and empiricism… the kind of Christ that cuddles up in the lap of academic elitism like a docile kitten, coddling an indifferent and self-serving owner in hopes of getting a friendly pat on the head.

A few things are play here I believe. The first is the absolute inability of Christian people to engage in honest ideological debate. I’ve watched the great atheists of our day debate Christian apologists. You can see the debates on YouTube if you’re ever bored. Be prepared to see Christianity absolutely dismantled as our inferiority complex is articulated in no uncertain terms by those seeking to explain our belief structure using the terms and definitions set forward by our ideological opponents.

Such inferiority causes a mad rush to bad science, horrible presumptions, and even more disgusting conclusions – such as belief that the fossil record has been fabricated, or that the geological strata can unequivocally demonstrate a world-wide flood. That’s not kowtowing, that is a brazen defiance of honest debate and communication. If it doesn’t change, it will be difficult for any rational person to accept any idea we cast forward at all.

Kowtowing happens when our inferiority complex takes us in the other direction; when we nuzzle up against the rationalist in hopes of a quick pat on the head. It occurs when we’ve inherently accepted the rules of debate without questioning those rules in the first place. It happens because we too have bought the idea that faith in a higher idea is of lesser value than the demonstrable, repeatable, and verifiable day to day reality in which we all live and thrive.

The confusion exists because we have (rather foolishly) equated two wholly different concepts: cause and value. Our Christ kowtows when we allow questions of cause to usurp questions of value and utility. Interestingly enough, we as a species will only allow this kind of kowtowing in certain arenas, religion being one of them.

For example, a firefighter could easily kowtow before the absolutely rational and empirical reality that human flesh can be consumed by fire. In truth, a degree of kowtowing must take place in a firefighter’s life if he or she wants to survive a fire via equipment and training. Nevertheless, there comes a time when the kowtowing stops. The firefighter must behave in a manner than counters the empirical reality of flesh and fire. The firefighter no longer cuddles in the lap of luxury like a docile kitten with the goal of never being burned. No, the firefighter makes an appeal to an idea and takes a measured response, at least usually. The measuring of this response considers cause and effect, i.e. fire = potential injury or death, but then moves from cause to value, i.e. fighting fire = potentially saving life. The leap from cause to value can happen under the watch of skillful planners who are on the site empirically monitoring the scope of the fire—and often does.

But the leap from cause to value can also happen in an instant of courage, in which cause is trumped by value with little to no mental exercise or reasoning at all. Men and women who make these kinds of leaps are most often regarded as heroes, even when their attempts fail and they lose their lives. Hence, the firefighter who escapes the prison of radical empiricism and behaves with a higher ordering for his or her actions is perceived quite differently than the religious person who may choose to do the same.

Recently inducted to sainthood is one man who against the common sense cause and effect relationship offered up by empiricism, rationalism, and naturalism, chose to live in a leper colony and distribute Christ’s compassion to others. Father Damien contracted leprosy and died.

Besides perhaps a few cynics, no one that I am aware of is calling for Father Damien’s legacy to kowtow itself before science and reason, but even the cynics who on the one hand might be willing to applaud Father Damien’s actions, will still call to the carpet the idea that a person might be willing to forgo the realities around them for the sake of living Christ.

“Keep your service to mankind, but lay your Jesus at my feet.” That’s the call of the modern day atheist who is quite busy erecting exchangeable ideologies for us to kowtow beneath. These ideologies are dressed in a much different set of clothes – covered in words like memetics and anti-clericalism. It’s the age-old battle presented in the third chapter of Genesis, the desire to make man his own God. The belief that we can see better than God, respond more fully than God, and behave more ethically than God.

Fascinating is this phenomenon considering that in our story, God became a person to show us the true meaning of personhood as he kowtowed to us in love and service, and for his compassion and kindness we dealt precipitously with his flesh in murderous contempt. The crucifixion story is one of hubris (both religious and other) taken to its ultimate, barbarous and bloody fruition. It’s not a story sent to cuddle in the lap of human reason and luxury any more than it is a story to wield against our fellow men with insecurity, fear, and mental ineptitude.

Christ is not a cause that can be successfully demonstrated using manmade litmus tests, but a value which must usher in a position of humility in the face of both the known and unknown. This kitten has claws and history has demonstrated time and time again that some will chose the route of fanaticism and misery and dispense it on their brothers and sisters without a second thought.

Even so, in knee-jerk fashion, others will kowtow and cuddle before ideologies scribed by human hands, exchanging God for genetics and the supernatural for the natural. Such a kowtowed Christ is equally harmful and as we enter a new age of hubris for our species – both on the Right and on the Left.

We must find a middle way.